One Great Big Lego . . .

Today’s New York Times article on 3-D printing brought up an idea I had in this blog some time back— using a big 3-D printer to build a house.  (I was mocked, I do believe.)

Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis either read my blog or my mind, or came up with the idea himself— and now I mock you, mockers!

Based on research done by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, Contour Crafting has created a giant 3-D printing device for building houses. The start-up company is seeking money to commercialize a machine capable of building an entire house in one go using a machine that fits on the back of a tractor-trailer.

Khoshnevis claims to be able to build a 2200-square-foot custom home in less than 24 hours, complete with plumbing, insulation, and electrical connections.  The home would be concrete, with steel supports added as necessary.  Presumably actual workers would add things like paneling, carpets, cabinets, and fixtures.

If this proves out (and if this design doesn’t, some other design will), I’d expect yet another crash in housing prices.  Why pay for a home at current prices when you can have a machine-built home for less than 50% of the cost?

Homes and apartments for poor people, particularly in the Third World, will be available where none had been before.  There may, however, be a lot more poor people, since one of construction’s traditional tasks is to provide entry-level jobs for blue-collar workers, and those would be gone.

The Times article goes on to mention another use for 3-D printers: printing artificial limbs for the disabled.

[Summit] uses a 3-D printer to create plastic shells that fit around the prosthetic limbs, and then wraps the shells in any flexible material the customer desires, be it an old bomber jacket or a trusty boot.

“We can do a midcentury modern or a Harley aesthetic if that’s what someone wants,” Mr. Summit said. “If we can get to flexible wood, I am totally going to cut my own leg off.”

Mr. Summit and his partner, Kenneth B. Trauner, the orthopedic surgeon, have built some test models of full legs that have sophisticated features like body symmetry, locking knees and flexing ankles. One artistic design is metal-plated in some areas and leather-wrapped in others.

“It costs $5,000 to $6,000 to print one of these legs, and it has features that aren’t even found in legs that cost $60,000 today,” Mr. Summit said.

“We want the people to have input and pick out their options,” he added. “It’s about going from the Model T to something like a Mini that has 10 million permutations.”

Customized limbs!  And my guess is that printer-created homes are going to be a lot wilder, more creative, and more in-your-face than the model in Contour Crafting’s videos.  Any shape, any size, any way you choose.

Which means the guy down the street from you— you know the one— who has the eighteen-foot Statue of Liberty in his front yard and the giant bronze American eagle glaring down at you from the rooftop . . . he’ll be able to have an entire home devoted to patriotic icons!  Maybe in the shape of an Abrams tank or a giant Dick Cheney head clenching a dead Islamohooligan in his teeth.

Soon our cities may well look more like Second Life than Second Life. Ah, the horror, the horror . . .